Paintball enthusiasts have participated in paintball practices, games and competitions for a number of decades. In these games, paintballs ordinarily sustain a range of forces in being shot out of specially designed guns using compressed gases. Typically, in paintball games, players on a paintball team will attempt to shoot the players of another team with such a paintball. Prior art paintballs may have included a frangible paintball shell (typically made from a gelatin) encapsulating a discrete paintball fill material. When the paintball impacts upon a surface, its shell may preferably have been designed to be break open and release the paintball fill material onto the impacted surface. (Depending on the fill material and the surface characteristics, damage and/or staining may have occurred.) When the paintball strikes an opposing player, the paintball may have preferably shattered and released the paintball fill material (e.g., paint) onto the player. Preferably, the paintball fill material may have left a mark sufficient to identify the marked player as having been disqualified from continuing the game.
In the formation of paintballs and other softgel capsules, it may have been known in the prior art to use a spreader box to dispense a gel (e.g., gelatin) from a spreader box opening onto a casting drum. The casting drum operatively rotates and carries the dragged gel from the spreader box opening, about a casting drum center of rotation, to solidify and form a gel ribbon (hereinafter alternately referred to as a web of paintball shell material). A pair of gel ribbons is drawn away from their respective casting drums, and then transported and fed between a pair of rotary dies that have matching die pockets. The two gel ribbons (or webs of paintball shell material) are thus brought together to form a single unitary web of paintball shell material which has a number of encapsulated pocket portions injected full of the paintball fill material. (The paintball fill material has heretofore been known to have been dispensed into the encapsulated pocket portions through an injection wedge located between the rotary dies.)
In the prior art, paintballs and other softgel capsules may have been somewhat costly to manufacture, due in no small part to the costs and materials associated with making the encapsulating shell. Discriminating consumers may have generally tended to prefer capsules of distinct colors. As such, in the prior art, it may have been rare and/or difficult for paintball or other capsule manufacturers to utilize recycled (hereinafter alternately referred to as “reclaimed”) capsule materials.
What is needed, therefore, is a way by which a paintball manufacturer might make more economic use of recycled capsule materials, while still providing for substantially pleasing and/or desirable capsule color characteristics. There may also exist a need for improved technology relating to paintball shells, and/or a way by which a paintball manufacturer might more economically manufacture paintball shells.
Now, in the prior art, it may also have been known to use spreader boxes to create striped paintball shells from two different shell materials. Any such previous spreader boxes, however, have allowed for the blending of the two shell materials—with one shell material being dispensed through a series of laterally spaced discharge openings into the other shell material—just prior to both of these shell materials being together dispensed from the spreader box onto a casting drum.
Clearly, the blending of paintball shell materials is not acceptable where one of the objects is to completely cover-up an underlying shell layer with a laminating shell layer. But, regardless of whether or not such prior art spreader boxes may have sufficiently protected against the (non-discrete) blending of paintball shell materials, they have certainly not been capable of forming a truly bi-laminar web of paintball shell material, and instead may have only been partially successful in forming spotty and/or intermittently striped ones.
It is an object of the present invention to obviate or mitigate at least one of the aforementioned mentioned disadvantages of the prior art, and/or to achieve one or more of the aforementioned objects of the invention.